Counselling for Depression: A Person-centred and Experiential Approach to Practice

This groundbreaking book takes a humanistic – person-centred and experiential – approach to counselling the most commonly presenting client issue: depression. For the first time, it establishes humanistic counselling as an evidence-based psychological intervention.

Chapters cover:

• Evidence-based practice and person-centred and experiential therapies
• The Counselling for Depression (CfD) competence framework
• The CfD therapeutic stance
• Working briefly
• In-depth case studies illustrating CfD in practice
• Training, supervision and research. 

The book is vital reading for those taking CfD training or a broader counselling and psychotherapy course, and for researchers and NHS workers wishing to enhance their practice.

Pete worked as a volunteer counsellor for ‘Off The Record’ in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the early 1970s whilst a psychology undergraduate. This, and a full time Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling at the University of Aston in Birmingham in 1974/5, set him on his subsequent career as a counsellor, trainer, supervisor and author. During this time he was the course leader on three BACP recognised courses, was centrally involved in establishing and running the BACP Trainer Accreditation Scheme, wrote, co-wrote or edited 15 books, and founded PCCS Training and PCCS Books with his wife Maggie.  Apart from his continuing interest in the development of theory and practice in person-centred and experiential therapies, he is dedicated to the demedicalisation of distress. Pete thinks that mental health services are in urgent need of reformation and is more likely to be found at a Hearing Voices Network conference than a BACP event. He is a Trustee of the Soteria Network, UK.

Having trained as a person-centred counsellor in the late 1980s, Andy Hill has worked as a trainer, counsellor and researcher for over 20 years. He worked originally as a further education lecturer at Oldham College, where he established counsellor training courses and a student counselling service, and subsequently as a senior lecturer at Salford University, where he was programme leader for a British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) accredited counsellor training programme.  He has authored systematic reviews in counselling older people (2004) and counselling in primary care (2008) and was lead author for the 2011 evaluation of the Welsh schools counselling strategy. He has played a leading role in the development of competence frameworks in a number of fields: humanistic counselling; counselling for depression; counselling young people; online counselling. He is a BACP accredited counsellor and has practised in student counselling, NHS psychotherapy services, NHS primary care and more recently in an Improving Access to Psychological Therapies service. His main area of professional interest is evidence-based practice and how humanistic therapies can engage with this paradigm in order to expand the range of therapies available to service-users in the NHS. As part of this work Andy is interested in how stronger links between research, training and practice can produce better therapeutic services and improved outcomes for service-users. Andy is currently Head of Research at BACP and so has an ongoing involvement in commissioning projects, undertaking research and disseminating research findings via the Association’s research journal Counselling and Psychotherapy Research and its annual research conference.